Since leadership centers on delivering and creating movement, it stands to reason that driving our actions as leaders through a filter of empathy is the right way to treat our salespeople and a more effective form of leadership when coaching for sales performance.

There always has to be trust for a customer to buy. If confidence in the market is down, you know where the trust needs to come from. It needs to come from you. You need to be thinking of this as a sales professional. How can I go out of my way? How can I double down on my efforts to increase a customer’s trust in me and the service I can provide? One way we can do that is to focus on gratitude.

How can you ensure your team is prepared for the new market? What tends to happen in a “hot” market is people get busy. Sales leaders and agents are slammed with admin and backlog work. Sales training and skill development often go by the wayside as we are likely to focus on sales results rather than sales behaviors.

The important task for the sales professional is to determine what they’ve based their fear upon. Is the fear legitimate? Is there a logical underpinning, or is it an emotional issue?

Certainly, nobody likes it when a customer complains. We don’t like it when a customer says they’re thinking about canceling the sale. But when we see markets shift, this is what happens. So, what can we do about it?

Buyers want to visualize maximizing the product or service they’re about to buy before they put down their hard-earned cash for your product or service. As a sales professional you have the opportunity to help them realize it’s possible and share experiences that worked well for others in their shoes.

Undoubtedly, Cost is a significant inhibitor. The Cost factor scares a great many salespeople. Many sales professionals take a proactive (though faulty) approach by immediately discussing discounts and deals. (Big mistake, by the way.)

I would argue that the best-qualified leads come from referrals. What makes referrals so powerful? I just wrote a book coauthored with Bob Mirman, From Contract to Close, about creating amazing homebuying experiences that generate referrals. Here are three reasons why referred buyers are more substantial buyers.

Great salespeople recognize the value of team play to the long-term success of the building organization. There are no silos here; all the departments are interconnected. The success of each department is contingent on the performance of all the other departments. Construction can never achieve excellent customer ratings if salespeople and studio designers promise more than construction can deliver.

Anticipated memories are opportunities to take a current moment in time and decide how we will reflect on it in the future. Are you leveraging Future Promise and these anticipated memories in your sales presentation best practices?